Electronic documents are used by computing device users to store, share, archive, and search information. Such documents are stored, temporarily or permanently, in files. Many different file formats exist. Each file format defines how the content of the file is encoded. In other words, based on the file format, the content of the file may be read and displayed.
While many different file formats exist, page description languages (PDLs) file formats are common for sharing and archiving data. To generate a PDL file (i.e., a file in a PDL file format), a user will often first create the document in a different file format, such as the file format of a word processing program. Then the user converts the file having the document to the PDL file.
During the conversion process, the content corresponding to text may be maintained to allow string searches on the text in the new format. Further, file metadata may be generated to describe the file as a whole, such as authorship, creation time, edit time, and other such data describing the entire file. However, other information from the original file is not transferred in the conversion process and, therefore, not searchable.